1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for managing application context, and more particularly to an apparatus and method for managing context which allows a user of a terminal to selectively collect and restore work environments (i.e., context information) of applications installed and used on the terminal.
2. Description of the Related Art
A method for collecting and restoring context information of office applications used for general purposes has not yet been standardized. This method also depends on internal interfaces provided by each application. Thus, it is difficult to simultaneously collect and restore context information from a variety of applications, so that it is difficult to manage the application context information. Conventionally, since application context information is not classified and unmanageable, methods which requires a user to store and restore a variety of context information of running applications personally by using a storage device are used to migrate context information even when only one application is running.
That is, since application context to be migrated is not classified and unmanageable, the user cannot selectively collect and restore context. For example, in conventional context information collection and restoration methods, application context information of MS Office is collected using a COM object on the MS Windows operating system, but the method may not be used for other applications on the same operating system, and also application context information of Linux Open Office is collected using a system call in the Linux operating system, but the method may not be used for other applications on the same operating system. Since these methods depend on each application, it is difficult for these methods to simultaneously collect context of a variety of applications on one operating system. Also, these conventional methods cannot selectively store and restore context desired by the user since context information of each office application cannot be classified to be collected. Thus, to store and restore context information, the user must personally migrate all context information including undesired context information or migrate only data of each application.
Using the conventional methods to collect, transmit, and restore all context information makes it impossible to individually select and restore context suitable for each work situation and is also very inefficient while causing security problems. Thus, there is a need to provide an apparatus and method which simultaneously supports a variety of applications and also allows selective collection and restoration of application context information desired by the user.